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Exhibition Reel of Two Color Film (ca. 1929)

An experimental color short in Brewster Color, preserved by George Eastman House and presented on the More Treasures DVD set.

NFPF ANNOUNCES PRODUCTION OF NEW AVANT-GARDE DVD SET
NEA and Warhol Foundation Grants Fund Treasures 6: Next Wave Avant-Garde

Contact: Jeff Lambert (415-392-7291, lambert@filmpreservation.org)

San Francisco, CA (December 7, 2011)—Thanks to a grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts last month, and an earlier grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Film Preservation Foundation will ramp up production of Treasures 6: Next Wave Avant-Garde and release the 2-DVD set in 2014.

Envisioned as a sequel to the NFPF’s award-winning Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947-1986, the new anthology explores how avant-garde film took root and spread after the 1950s as the next generation embraced diversity and forged connections with conceptual and performance art. Treasures 6 will tour the national scene from New York’s Lower East Side to Los Angeles, hitting many points in between. During this restless, questioning era, emerging filmmakers took many paths. Some crossed over into the art world, others gleefully subverted cinematic norms, and still others tackled social issues head on. Taken together, they found new inspiration and rethought avant-garde filmmaking from the inside out.

The 5-1/2 hour anthology will present some two dozen films selected from the preservation work of America’s major avant-garde film archives—the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Anthology Film Archives, Harvard Film Archive, the Museum of Modern Art, New York University, the Pacific Film Archive, and UCLA Film & Television Archive. None of the line-up has been available before on DVD. Some have been unavailable in good-quality prints for years.

The NFPF's critically acclaimed Treasures DVD series is used in libraries and universities around the world. The sets have been honored by the National Society of Film Critics, the Video Software Dealers Association, and Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, Italy’s festival of film preservation, and have become a staple in the teaching of film and history.

The National Film Preservation Foundation is the nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America's film heritage. Since starting operations in 1997, the NFPF has assisted institutions in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, and helped preserve more than 1,850 films and collections. The NFPF is the charitable affiliate of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. For more information on the NFPF's programs, please visit www.filmpreservation.org.

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